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By the numbers: The 2013 Toronto Flood

Now that the worst of the water has drained away and the city's infrastructure is (almost) back to normal, now seems like a good time to take stock of Toronto's biggest ever rain event. In the minutes after the surprise deluge began, thousands of buildings went dark, the subway ground to a halt, and major highways, local roads, and underpasses disappeared beneath the murky brown water - all in time for the evening rush-hour.

Using the data that's currently available (there's still a lot of tallying going on) it's possible to get a sense of the storm and its effects. The fact that there were very few injuries is a symbol of the lessons learned from Hurricane Hazel, Toronto's deadliest natural disaster made worse by poor city planning.

The sheer amount of rain that fell on the Toronto is absolutely staggering. Using precipitation figures for downtown and the number of square metres in the city limits, it's possible to estimate around 61,110,000,000 (61.1 billion) litres of liquid fell from the sky. By comparison, the Rogers Centre, closed and filled to the top of its domed roof, would only hold 1,600,000,000 (1.6 billion) litres.

A giant would need to use the stadium as a bucket (and the roof as a cup) 38 times to bail out all of the rain were it gathered into a single sprawling lake. That body of water, by the way, could cover an area of 630 square kilometres to a very shallow depth.

At the peak of the deluge around 300,000 Toronto Hydro customers were without power, almost a third of its 709,000 subscribers. It's important to note the term "customers" doesn't equal people: an apartment building and family home both represent just one subscriber, the company says.

The outage also affected the TTC, particularly underground. 5 separate closures snarled subway network and left 37 of 69 stations without service. Just 65 shuttle buses made avoiding the chaos practically impossible.

Also on the rails, a Richmond Hill bound GO train became trapped just south of Pottery Road amid rising Don River flood waters. 1,400 people (and 1 Northern water snake) were on board by the transit agency's estimate.

In terms of calls for help, the city's non-emergency 311 line received more than 1,000 notices about flooded basements. Figures aren't yet available for 911 calls, though emergency services said they experienced a high volume of requests for help.

There were kids on Lakeshore (Lakeshore / Bathurst) area that were posing, jumping, splashing and laying in the brown, murky water. It was pretty gross. Thankfully no one was drowning in this harrowing experience.

He's been in office for three years, and supposedly cares about infrastructure and the little guy, and yet has systematically nickeled and dimed infrastructure at every juncture, not to mention the missed opportunity for THOUSANDS of good-paying construction jobs for citizens.

Ford has been in office for THREE years and even after this massive storm, he STILL doesn't have a clue what to do or what we should waste precious tax dollars on it.

I have a small private aquatic petting zoo which I had maintained in the west end of Toronto. During this horrific storm my tanks overflowed and I lost 13 of my 20 sea otters and my prized walrus named Smooshi, who I rescued last year from horrific conditions at marine land. My heart weeps for my lost pets, but really best friends. All I can do is pray that they are safe and that they are returned to me soon. :( Damn you storm, DAMN YOU!!!

Monday's rainfall was a record for Pearson Airport. However, other parts of Toronto received more rain during Hurricane Hazel (over 200 mm) than even that amount.

Nonetheless, there could have been more water being drained by rivers, streams, sewers, and valleys. There is more parking lots, wide highways, roofs, and streets that does not allow the rain to filter into the groundwater. Instead, it just adds more water to the runoff.

We don't design infrastructure to handle storms that large. The storm we received has a probability of occurring once every hundred years or so. Definitely some areas flooded that shouldn't have (like basements) but flooding on the DVP or underneath the railway overpass on king street is not unexpected.

Now, if storms like this become the new normal due to climate change then we have a bigger problem. Time will tell if that's the case but if it is then the solution won't be a matter of bigger pipes in the ground. It will involve a total rethink around the way we build cities.

The storm we got was more than a 100 yr storm. This is the Intensity-Duration chart for a 100 yr storm for Pearson. The chart shows the Total length of the storm, and the amount of rain that has to fall during that time for it to be a 100 yr storm. (a 5 minute cloudburst that drops 18.7 mm and one day's worth of steady 4.7 mm/hr rainfall are both 100 yr storms)

1. I don't get the graph. There are two possible interpretations, yielding the following ratios of the radius of the blue circle to the radius of the black circle. The first assumes the area occupied by the circle is proportional to the volume of rainfall: (61,110/1,600)^(1/2) = 38.2^0.5 = 6.2. Alternatively, the circles could be spheres filled with water: (61,110/1,600)^(1/3) = 3.4. Instead, the blue area has a radius 22 times that of the black area. Why?
2. "a very shallow depth" is ambiguous until you do the math and determine that in this case it is arbitrarily 9.7cm. It could as easily be 1 cm (6,110 square kilometres) or 1 m (61.1 square kilometres).

The above issues considered, how can the raw numbers presented themselves even be trusted?

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